Or... Scrooge is simply saying it as a joke, using exaggeration to make his point (that he's been around the block a few times).
Yes, as Deb said about the "End of Flood" sale: another windy story or over-the-top exaggeration. I like imagining Scrooge's tone of voice when he says things like that! Why, you young whippersnappers....
The other two references in the same story are fairly credible, however. (And I'd pay good money to see a good artist depict Scrooge living an adventure at the 1904 world fair!)
In my personal headcanon, I have decided contra Rosa that Blackheart is Grandpa Beagle's father. I even have two trading cards in my collection, the French one for Blackheart and the German one for Grandpa (Opa) Beagle, and I personally hold that these cards are for different characters. Happily the two cards don't use the same illustration, so I can see them as different persons with a strong family resemblance .
Grandpa Beagle being one of Blackheart's sons is better than Rosa's option, but that still leaves the fact that The Money Well-Grandpa doesn't know who Scrooge is. But maybe you mean that Grandpa is a fourth unseen brother who was not present in The Fantastic River Race?
Yet another option would be that Grandpa Beagle is Blackheart's grandson, born a few years after The Fantastic River Race. I like this option the best. Of course, nothing can change the fact that Blackheart and Grandpa are clearly the same character in Lo$, inconsistencies notwithstanding.
I find it fascinating that Rosa allowed himself to disregard Barks' continuity like this - especially since Rosa is probably the one Duck comics-creator who values adhering to continuity the most.
I love that Rosa merged the Grandpa Beagle and Blackheart characters. By doing this, he added so much depth that wasn't there before to the Grandpa Beagle character. And Grandpa Beagle not remembering Scrooge in "The Money Well" can be easily explained by him being very old and senile. So while Barks clearly inteded these two to be two seperate characters, Rosa merging them didn't create a significant contradiction.
By the way, most of the Barksian facts about Scrooge's past that weren't used in the Lo$ were intentionally left out (such as the existence of the magic hourglass), but I wonder how many of these facts were left out because Rosa forgot them or wasn't aware of them. Webfoot Tech and Miss Penny Wise both belong in this category, right? Any others?
I only have this link that says "Rosa also discounted 'Island in the sky' and 'The interplanetary postman' as "fictional fiction", meaning the stories didn't really happen."
Does anyone have an email thread where Don Rosa himself discounts these stories? (not just second-hand telling in forum "he said" )
If Rosa did "officially" discount "Island in the Sky", I'm sure it's because of its depiction of Duckburg as a science-fictional City of the Future, where space travel is a common phenomenon; that approach doesn't mesh with Rosa's preferred 1950s period setting for the Ducks. I would assume his reaction to "Interplanetary Postman" would be similar, although in that story, eccentric as it is, space travel is actually treated as more of a big deal than in "Island"; Scrooge's crew of mailmen all freak out on being asked to deliver a letter to Venus, and the announcer at Scrooge's blast-off talks about the "spirit of Columbus," implying this is the first time anyone's made such a trip.
I would have loved to see an origin story of Bolivar by Don Rosa.
Ah, I recall that in an early Don Rosa Library-behind the scenes commentary, Rosa promised that he would explain why he didn't use Bolivar in a later commentary... Seems like he forgot, so it's nice to finally have that mystery solved!
Personally, I'm very fine with Rosa not having given Bolivar a proper introduction. I've always figured that YD 55-10-13 works as both an origin story and an exit story for Bolivar, thus explaining why he is absent for most of Barks' and all of Rosa's stories!
That was wise on DR's part! Because there are three solutions I can see, and none are ideal : (a) Scrooge is losing his mind, (b) Scrooge was born in the XIIIth century, (c) he met some guy named "Marco Polo" after the famous explorer.
In the very same story, he also says that he sold concertinas to the soldiers of the Czar and that he sold recordings of "The Bagage Coach Ahead" at the 1904 world fair. Unlike the Marco Polo case, both these statements are plausible.
Option D would be a time-travel adventure! The Castle McDuck Ghosts aside, Rosa seems to have shied away from overtly fantastical elements in the Life & Times for understandable reasons, but such an incident wouldn't be out-of-place in his Duckverse (e.g. Once and Future Duck), let alone the wider Disney Comics universe.
Were I writing this story as a L&T "bonus chapter", I might make it a slight homage to Barks's Old California, with Scrooge waking up back in the present at the end and rationalizing that his encounter with the 13th century explorer must have been some kind of a fever-dream - although part of him wonders…
I believe I've found an event from Scrooge's past that was not referenced in The Life & Times of Scrooge McDuck. In W WDC 226-01 Scrooge says he saw the Fijis and the Samoan Islands close-up when he traded coconuts in "the eighties" (which would be the 1880s).
I could be mistaken, but I don't think any such event is portrayed in TheLife & Times. Scrooge trading coconuts in the 1880s could still occur off-screen of course, so it's not as though Rosa dismissed it as non-canon or anything. I hope this still was worth mentioning in the thread.